We love to play our Data East TMNT Pinball, but unfortunately the ball got lost more and more often, due to weak flippers. The flippers did hold up, but one could easily push the down, and so did the ball. What’s the problem a big mystery! First, we thought it’s something mechanical and did rebuild the flippers – both side. For that we used the DA Flipper Rebuild kid from Pinball Center(?). The flippers got more precise, but kept on being weak. It had to be something electronic.

So we started to learn about Solid State Flippers, were the control unit is located and Diodes. We followed this great guide from Flipperwinkel, a lots of insights, but couldn’t spot any problem. So we started measuring volts and current. It turned out that one of the fuses was broken. Important part about this is, that the flipper controller has four fuses. One for each flipper to activate, and two to hold any flipper. Which means, even when one hold fuse is broken, the other still holds up. But only half the current, so the flippers results in being weak. We replaced the broken fuse, and the flipper work as strong as never before… check!

Let’s talk about credentials. Credentials! Who doesn’t work without any secret data which should never go public? Sure, sure, we’d never share those secrets public, but then there’s git, and github and.. BAAMM.. credentials exposed. Upps!

To avoid this, it’s common sense to NOT checkin any credentials. NEVER. EVER. We make use of .gitignore, cfg templates and placeholders. But nevertheless it’s a hassle, especially when working in a team, where a credential exchange is sometimes required. In past, I preferred the solution where an encryption server in a save environment took care about encrypting/decrypting data. Once the data is encrypted, it’s save to checkin, store and share in the same way like any other data. Only users (or systems) with access rights for the encryption server can decrypt the data. Instant WIN! But how to setup such a server?

Introducing: Vault Project

I recently came across the Vault Project which exactly meet all my needs. In addition, it’s open source, simple to use and comes with very good documentation and tutorials. Nevertheless, I couldn’t find all the steps required to setup an encryption server in one place, so here they are:

How to setup an Encryption server with Vault

First, setup a new vault server on a remote machine by following those steps:

This will output five keys and a root token. Make sure to keep those keys save, once lost you wouldn’t be able to unseal your vault, and therefore gain access. The root token is needed to authenticate against the server. To remove the need of passing in the host address all the time, you can set the value with VAULT_ADDR too: export VAULT_ADDR=http://127.0.0.1:8200

In order to allow other people access to the vault and decrypt data, it’s the easiest to enable github authentication. In this case, every user part to a specific github team is able to obtain an auth-token themselves.

Per default, vault stores data associated with a key. But for our case, we want to encrypt data on the fly and manage storage within our SCM instead. Encryption only is enabled with the ‘tranist backend’:

I hope this helped setting up your own vault server. These are just the first rough steps. Vault allows way more, like very granular access management, various auth and storage backends etc. Again, I strongly recommend to check their docs https://vaultproject.io/docs and follow the interactive tutorial https://vaultproject.io/#/demo/0.c

Since a very long time, I had my old 4th Generation iPod laying around. With iPhone, SoundCloud & Co, I hadn’t had any use for it – until now: my Camping Van came ‘only’ with a CD Radio and an Aux-In – which is perfect for my Ipod. If it would only work. Battery was down, and even worse – the Harddisk crashed. But a quick google made me hope: there’s indeed a chance to replace the HD with Flash memory. Faster, cheeper and less power consumption. I had to try it.
So I followed those super easy steps Eddie posted on instructables:

Main trick is to get a ‘IDE 50 Pin Male zu CF Compact Flash Female Adapter’ – on ebay or similar for just 5 EURs. Compact Flash memory you get for abt. 1EUR per GB, which int total, made the 40GB replacement quite cheap. It just took me minutes to replace the harddrive, including a new Battery. Now my more than 10 years(!!) old iPod works better like never before! Amazing.

Good news: I finally got the Satzuma Missile Launcher working on my Mac Yosemite. Solution it the latest (unfortunately unreleased) version of USB Missile Launcher NZ. You can download USB Missile Launcher NZ v1.8.2 from here, a source I found after digging through the comments of version 1.8.1 announcement: